Flipped PD

April 6, 2012 at 6:41 am

This is a little project I am working on, inspired by a workshop I recently participated in with Marc-André Lalande and Avi Spector about Flipping the Classroom. Marc-André mentioned, on a few occasions, that PD could be flipped as well. So I’m going to try it out. I’m going to start collecting resources that I could use to flip some PD.

Why? (That’s a huge question. It’s important to know why I want to do something.)

How often have you been to PD where you just want to get to the nitty gritty, to the tools you can use in your classroom tomorrow, but you need to sit through an hour of theory to have a rushed 30 minutes of practical application thrown at you at the end…if there’s time.

So Frustrating.

Flipping things, asking participants to learn the theory on their own pre-session or even offering opportunities to brush up on the theory during the session on an individual basis by making a few computers / ipads / whatever available for participants to consult if / when they need them, would allow for more hands on opportunity during the workshop. Even better, just offer a youtube channel or a webpage of links to resources and participants can access them on their phones while they are working on practical application (creating learning situations, for example).

So I’m going to use this page as a place to collect some resources I anticipate being useful for the work I do.

Learning Difficulties/Disabilities and Inclusion

Cheryl and Morgan: Learning Independence - a Grade 11 student with difficulties is able to participate academically with help from voice activated Google search tools. (Basically an ad for Google, but useful to show how a simple modification to what we allow students to do can change everything for them)

Pedagogy

Quick Tips for Teaching Mini-Courses – I find that these quick tips, 5 in all, are relevant for much more than just a mini-course. In particular the concept of sticking to higher order concepts.

Using Tech ToolsInteresting Ways – A collection of teacher created presentations, tips, ideas on interesting ways to use different tech tools in the classroom. Like interesting ways to use iPads or Google Docs or to support reading/writing/math, etc… I love it because the resources are teacher-created.